Get OpenBoard working under NixOS

Hello!

I would like to use OpenBoard on NixOS. The program can be found at https://www.openboard.ch/index.en.html.

The program is not found inside nixpkgs repository and neither in the NUR repos. I tried writing a derivation to get it working, but I did not succeed so far. Still a novice at this.

Any help would be appreciated!

Is there a snippet default.nix you’ve tried? It seems they use qmake so you may get inspiration with git grep qmake in Nixpkgs and search for other packages that are built that way?

I also see that they recommend build it against the latest qt5 which is 5.5:

While we have an issue with qt5 upgrade:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/74355

@doronbehar
I did not go the build from source route, but rather let the default.nix file download the .deb file they provide and extract that. I have seen a few packages on nixpkgs repo that also do that. But I don’t know most of the functions used and I cannot find an explanation on the nix manual either.

So I am mostly stepping in the dark trying out random things.